THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY CHEER: 180+ Novels, Tales & Poems in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Лаймен Фрэнк Баум

       Nativity a Christmas (John Donne)

       Boar's Head Carol

       Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus (Charles Wesley)

       Coventry Carol

       Here We Come A-wassailing

       A Defective Santa Claus (James Whitcomb Riley)

       King Winter (Anonymous)

       Christmas Gifts and Other Poems (Carolyn Wells)

       The Night After Christmas (Anonymous)

      Novels

       Table of Contents

Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (L. Frank Baum)

       Table of Contents

       YOUTH

       1. Burzee

       2. The Child of the Forest

       3. The Adoption

       4. Claus

       5. The Master Woodsman

       6. Claus Discovers Humanity

       7. Claus Leaves the Forest

       MANHOOD

       1. The Laughing Valley

       2. How Claus Made the First Toy

       3. How the Ryls Colored the Toys

       4. How Little Mayrie Became Frightened

       5. How Bessie Blithesome Came to the Laughing Valley

       6. The Wickedness of the Awgwas

       7. The Great Battle Between Good and Evil

       8. The First Journey with the Reindeer

       9. "Santa Claus!"

       10. Christmas Eve

       11. How the First Stockings Were Hung by the Chimneys

       12. The First Christmas Tree

       OLD AGE

       1. The Mantle of Immortality

       2. When the World Grew Old

       3. The Deputies of Santa Claus

      YOUTH

       Table of Contents

      1. Burzee

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      Have you heard of the great Forest of Burzee? Nurse used to sing of it when I was a child. She sang of the big tree-trunks, standing close together, with their roots intertwining below the earth and their branches intertwining above it; of their rough coating of bark and queer, gnarled limbs; of the bushy foliage that roofed the entire forest, save where the sunbeams found a path through which to touch the ground in little spots and to cast weird and curious shadows over the mosses, the lichens and the drifts of dried leaves.

      The Forest of Burzee is mighty and grand and awesome to those who steal beneath its shade. Coming from the sunlit meadows into its mazes it seems at first gloomy, then pleasant, and afterward filled with never-ending delights.

      For hundreds of years it has flourished in all its magnificence, the silence of its inclosure unbroken save by the chirp of busy chipmunks, the growl of wild beasts and the songs of birds.

      Yet Burzee has its inhabitants—for all this. Nature peopled it in the beginning with Fairies, Knooks, Ryls and Nymphs. As long as the Forest stands it will be a home, a refuge and a playground to these sweet immortals, who revel undisturbed in its depths.

      Civilization has never yet reached Burzee. Will it ever, I wonder?

      2. The Child of the Forest

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      Once, so long ago our great-grandfathers could scarcely have heard it mentioned, there lived within the great Forest of Burzee a wood-nymph named Necile. She was closely related to the mighty Queen Zurline, and her home was beneath the shade of a widespreading oak. Once every year, on Budding Day, when the trees put forth their new buds, Necile held the Golden Chalice of Ak to the lips of the Queen, who drank therefrom to the prosperity of the Forest. So you see she was a nymph of some importance, and, moreover, it is said she was highly regarded because of her beauty and grace.

      When she was created she could not have told; Queen Zurline could not have told; the great Ak himself could not have told. It was long ago when the world was new and nymphs were needed to guard the forests and to minister to the wants